Today, just four years later--and a spectacularly lousy four years for luxury products like Penot's--Le Labo has grown into a $4.5 million a year fragrance brand with four stand-alone boutiques worldwide (and four more planned by the end of this year), plus 12 counters inside the world's most exclusive retail enclaves, including Barneys New York and Colette in Paris.
— From On the Nose at Entrepreneur.
Goes to show what can happen if you actually have good product to sell! Ultimately the gimmick of the LeLabo counter being a lab and all that doesn’t really make a difference – they make scents that are interesting and very wearable, at a price point that is luxury but not over the top.
It’s great news, isn’t it, that quality product is (at least in this case, but I suspect others also) selling well?
Frankly, the business about mixing at the time of purchase doesn’t interest me at all….but yes, great fragrances!
I havent tried Le labo yet. Do you think the fragrances are consistant, since they are being hand mixed by different people each time? Thats the only thing that scares me away from this brand. Well and the price, but that goes without saying.
Well, the bottle of Rose 31 I bought smelled just like my sample purchased from a different seller – I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have it down to a science, so to speak.
I hadn’t considered that…..but I would assume that they have a strict recipe and accurate measuring tools. The bottle of Fleur D’Oranger 27 smells close enough to the sample vial that I sure never noticed any difference, and I’ve only sniffed the one bottle. Now I have a decant of Iris 39 from one wonderful NSTer and am expecting another from a different perfume buddy any day now—and you can be sure that I’ll be doing a side by side test!
In theory though–I think you could have variations batch to batch with any fragrance produced anywhere. Simply because different harvests of the same material may have variations.
Rictor: I wouldn’t worry. I think their quality assurance is excellent; and someone I know who ordered a very large bottle and thought it smelled “off” wrote the company, sent it back, got a personal reply from the founder (who judged it perfectly ok), but received a new bottle anyway.
They are not really hand mixing…they are just doing the last step of adding the alcohol. And personally have never seen the point of that, but whatever!
The “expiration date” is what annoys me. According to Le Labo, once a perfume is a year old, it has expired. However, my bottle of Iris 39 still smells the same to me as when I purchased it two years ago!
Just ignore it! Most companies tell you perfume goes bad after 6 months…and of course, some perfume does, but most doesn’t.
Considering that 15 ml of a lovely Bergamote 22 go for the reasonable price of 50 quid in London, I’m not surprised their business is growing… I tried few Le Labo fragrances, and I’m not really convinced.Their Neroli 36 is quite bland, although you can tell it’s top quality. Same for their Bergamote 22, which is lovely but a bit generic. And this number business is a bit annoying, looks like nicknames on ebay : ) .
Of their initial offerings, I thought the men’s were much better than the womens…agree on the Neroli, although I do like the Bergamote. The Rose 31 was their best, I think.